Story Pole: Feet Inch Stairs

Feet, inches and fractions, exactly. Stairs checked against the IRC. Concrete by the cubic yard. One payment, no subscription, works with no signal.

Your phone's calculator can't do 5' 7-3/8" + 2' 11-5/16". This one can, and it stays exact the whole way through, so four operations later you're not off by a sixteenth.

WHAT IT DOES • Tape measure. Add, subtract, multiply, divide in feet, inches and fractions. Metric underneath if you want it. • Stairs. Riser height, treads, stringer, cut list. • Roof. Pitch as rise over run, common rafters, hips and valleys. • Squaring. What the diagonal should be, and how far off yours is. • Concrete. Cubic yards to order, or the bag count at the published yield. • Materials. Tile, paint, lumber, on real dressed sizes. A 2x4 is 1-1/2" by 3-1/2".

ABOUT THAT CUT LIST Nine foot one over fifteen risers works out to 7 and 4/15 of an inch. There's no such mark on a tape. Cut all fifteen at 7-1/4" and your top step comes up a quarter inch short, and people feel that with their feet. So the app gives you eleven at 7-1/4" and four at 7-5/16". Add them up and you get nine foot one exactly.

That's the same reason every answer in here tells you whether it's exact or rounded.

CODE CHECK Stairs are checked against IRC 2021 R311.7.5, named on screen. Over the limit and it says by how much, then offers the riser count that fixes it. It's the model residential code. Your jurisdiction may have amended it, and the app says that too, instead of telling you you're fine.

WHERE THE NUMBERS COME FROM Lumber from PS 20-20. Bag yields off Quikrete and Sakrete's own data sheets. Paint coverage from Sherwin-Williams. Listed in Settings with the date each one was checked, so go look.

SENDING IT ON Save a calculation, give it a name, send the day's numbers as plain text to whoever does the ordering.

ONE PAYMENT, NOT A SUBSCRIPTION The feet-inch calculator and the squaring check are free and stay free. Run something you already know the answer to before you spend anything.

Works with no signal. No account, and your measurements never leave the phone. It does send an anonymous count of how often the app gets opened and used. That count says nothing about what you measured, and Settings has a switch to stop it.